You need to give your customers an exciting and engaging experience when visiting your website. Imagine you created the perfect website – flawless layout, performance, navigation and copy. Whether you’re going for a dark theme like Nutshell Apps or something more light and airy, if the colour scheme is off or lacking, this can let your whole website down.
Colour plays an integral role in how we perceive the World. Therefore, it can radically change how we perceive companies and their websites. In website design, colour schemes can often take a backseat. In this blog post, we are sharing important tips that can help you create a great colour scheme.
Colour psychology basics
The role of colour psychology in marketing is an important one. Colour associations are incredibly powerful, and we develop these from being young. These associations are instinctive and subconscious.
For example, red can express feelings of love, danger and anger. Green represents life, growth and money. These associations are more important than before as so many brands now have to maintain a global presence. Colour associations may differentiate from country to country, therefore a colour that might have positive connotations in the UK, may associate with something negative elsewhere.
Colour theory basics
Basically, colour theory is the science of how colour works. There are several concepts that you can pick up to develop your understanding of colour for your website design.
You need to understand primary, secondary and tertiary colours.
Primary colours are colours that can’t be made by mixing any other two colours together. There are three primary colours: red, blue and yellow.
Secondary colours are created by mixing two other colours together. For example, mixing blue and yellow (primary colours) will create green (secondary colour).
Tertiary colours are created by mixing a primary colour and a secondary colour that are next to each other on the colour wheel. For example, mixing blue (primary colour) with green (secondary colour) to create a teal blue-green colour.
Next, you have warm and cool colours. Warm colours are reds, oranges and yellows, whilst blues, greens and purple are cool colours.
Finally, it’s important to understand colour nuances. Not every colour you see is a pure colour, many colours that you can see online are affected in some way.
For example, you might see colours that are tinted (a colour with white added), a shade (a colour with black added) or a tone (a colour with grey added).
You could also be seeing an oversaturated or desaturated colour which can affect how bright or dull a colour is.
There’s an awful lot of to colour nuances, but as long as you understand the basic points you will be able to achieve a stunning colour scheme for your website.
Mixing colour combinations
Another key element of picking the right colour scheme is selecting a good combination of colours. Depending on the number of colours you work with, your colour scheme may have several colour combinations.
Understanding colour nuances is crucial when thinking about colour combinations for your website. You will need to know why certain colours work well together and how to modify these to best suit your scheme.
Colour theory is essential in telling us what colours work well together. There are five main colour combinations.
Complementary colours sit across from each other on a colour wheel. One will be a warm colour and the other a cool colour. For example, red and green are complementary colours.
Split complimentary colours are made up of a base colour and two colours that are adjacent to the base colour on a colour wheel. For example, blue (base colour), orange and yellow. TCU Group effectively use split complimentary colours like stated above blue and orange.
Triads and tetradic colours have similar relationships. Triads use colours that are evenly spaced on the colour wheel like red, blue and yellow. Tetradic colours are four colours comprised of two pairs of complimentary colours like red, green, blue and orange.
Analogous colours sit next to each other on the colour wheel and are extremely similar like red and orange.
Finally, monochromatic colours are simply variations of the same colour, and this can be accomplished by different tones, shades and tints.
There are many different things to understand when it comes to picking the right colour scheme for your website. But with this blog and understanding how they work, will stand you in good stead to picking the right one for your company.